NEWBERRY, MI -- Here in the heart of the Duck Lake fire zone, where the inferno burned the hottest, the forest is a river of gold.

Wave after wave of ferns have turned from summer green to autumn yellow. The scorched earth is disguised. There are few trees, but many low lying stumps, black and shaded by the explosive new undergrowth. Great piles of jack pine await logging trucks.

Along a dirt road simply named County 414, Andrew Schrauben is standing at the roadside, taking pictures of an enormous mechanical processor chewing through trees.

The yellow and black Ponsse harvester, “a logger’s best friend,” moves from tree to tree. A claw extends to grasp the base of a tree, separates it, then turns the more than 32-foot pine horizontally. Eight-foot logs are spit to the right, bark and branches stripped in the process.

The forest echoes with the high-pitched whine of its chainsaw, followed by something like teeth chewing rocks. A loaded logging truck, “Papa Toad” on its front, has just left the area.

“This is amazing,” says Schrauben, a city councilman from Lowell, east of Grand Rapids. He is sight-seeing before a Michigan Municipal League convention on Mackinac Island.

“I had forgotten about this fire. … When I heard about this, we had to come back here.”

Loggers are trying to salvage what they can from Michigan’s third-largest wildfire in more than a century, covering 33 square miles. It began May 24, and they are in a race against time.

There is still unburned wood to be found inside the blackened bark, good for lumber or chipped for plywood. But wood-boring beetles are destroying the timber, and winter is on its way.

Signs of the fire linger in town

Loaded logging trucks rumble daily along the dirt roads leading out of the fire zone, boiling dust in their wake. Some loggers have been given a reprieve from state commitments elsewhere, to log here first.

Many pass through Newberry, 14 miles to the south, down main street and past Duke’s Sport Shop.

BY THE NUMBERS

21,069 Acres in the Duck Lake fire zone

15,700 Acres that are state land

9,774 Acres of state land being logged

53,857 Cords of wood being logged

25 Cords of wood per truckload

2,100 Truckloads of logs

50 Percent of trees logged so far

It is always 1:35 at Duke’s, or 10:43. It depends on which side of the broken clock you’re viewing as it juts above the store. Apparently, the Roto-Dial timekeeper from Wichita, Kansas, can’t run forever.

Business is nothing like seven or eight years ago, when anglers and hunters with good manufacturing jobs came to town flush with cash. But Duke’s saw a small uptick this past summer.

“Some were just plain old sightseers. They’d ask, ‘Where’s the fire?’” says the proprieter, pulling a cigarette from his shirt pocket, the no-smoking law be damned.

Next door, another sign is punctuated by age. It’s says “Bill e’s” or “B llie’s.” It depends on whether you are looking north or south. Below, in three windows fronting the variety store, is a hand-painted message, “thank you, fire-fighters, thank you”. The lettering is orange, outlined in white, the Newberry Indians’ team colors.

“A man came in the other day and said, ‘Don’t you think that’s a little retro,’” said Janette Greenwood, owner of the store named for her late mother.

Few people know there were flare-ups weeks later, sending firefighters back to douse hot spots uncovered by loggers. So the sign remains, more than four months later, but may go soon.

“I thought, you know, maybe when the snow is flying,” she says.

Outside, logging trucks continue to rumble by.

Damaged from within, this mature pine was felled to prevent it from toppling on sightseers, loggers, or other bypassers.John Barnes | MLive.com

Setting a price on what's left

Of 21,069 acres in the Duck Lake fire zone, 15,700 are on public land. Within 36 days, logging rights were sold by the state for just under 10,000 of those acres. Dead and damaged trees were under attack by beetles.

Nobody wants two-by-fours with holes in them.

“We wanted to get them up here to salvage this right away, so they didn’t deteriorate any further,” says Keith Magnusson, manager of the Department of Natural Resources’ Newberry Unit, which includes 355,000 acres.

Sixteen auctions were held for various areas. Winning bids averaged just under $8 a cord for jack pine. The lowest was $3. Highest was $30 a cord for a relatively good stand of red pine which normally would fetch about $78.

The total of all stumpage sold in the 16 salvage sales was $515,856. “It’s good to see some use of it,” Magnusson said.

Erica Motto, with her husband Bryan and U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, is overcome with emotion as she talks about the logging equipment they lost in the Duck Lake fire. The photo is from a press conference south of the fire.MLive.com file photo

Out of the logging business

Bryan and Erica Motto would like to see their wood put to use too, but they are no longer in business.

Bryan, 29, was logging trees purchased from a private landowner when he left the site shortly after noon on May 24. He got a phone call late that afternoon that there was a big fire about two miles away. By the time he got there, he could not get back in.

All was lost, the processer, the skidder, harvested timber, an equipment trailer and tools, and a travel trailer they’d purchased less than a year earlier.

“We’ve got all the wood sitting up there and nobody actually wants it,” says Erica, 28.

They used insurance from the trailer to get by while Bryan is out of work. After delays the adjuster and insurer blamed on each other, the Mottos finally got paid around Labor Day weekend for the processor and skidder. It was nearly $200,000, but not enough to start over.

“I know he loves working in the woods and he is really having a hard time not working out there, a lot. I feel bad about that,” Erica says.

Still, there is hope. The insurance money may help him buy into a local cedar products company.

The state would have eventually logged parts of this area to manage the timber, but not so much at once.John Barnes | MLive.com

2,100 truckloads of timber

On this day, logging on the public land is about 50 percent completed. Before it is done, about 2,100 truckloads will be hauled out of the damaged area, nearly 54,000 cords of wood.

Much of the area will regenerate naturally; jack pine cones require heat to drop seeds.

Bob Williams, whose home in the fire zone was spared, is the most frequent caller to the DNR’s Newberry Management Unit.

Active with The Nature Conservancy, he has many concerns and questions, not all easy to answer.

“Some areas of burnt jack pine did not reseed naturally. What will the DNR do for these areas to restore the habitat necessary for so much animal life?” wonders Willimas. “What will the effect of the fire have on bird populations and reproduction?”

Areas that don't regenerate will be replanted with seedlings grown at the DNR's Wyman Nursery in Manistique, the DNR says. Private landowners are responsible for their own burned-out timber.

Some areas will regenerate naturally from jack pine seeds that are released by extreme heat. Other areas may need help from foresters.Courtesy | Michigan DNR

They had until this past Tuesday to apply for the federal Emergency Forest Restoration Program. The program provides up to 75 percent of the cost to restore land damaged by wildfire.

Some public stands are not being logged, either because they are in protected state or federal areas or trees are too remote or too small to be economically harvested.

Wildlife that feed on insect-infested wood could benefit there. The black-backed, three-toed woodpecker - under endangered species petition elsewhere - has increased its numbers by the hundreds, with more expected in the spring.

Three weeks after the blaze started, the fire zone was declared 100 percent contained. Ground patrols have ceased, but aerial patrols continue watch.

Some of the flames burned into the ground, “duff” fire that lingered in peat moss, root systems and other cover several feet thick.